Is Getting SEO Provider For Your Website An Effective Way To Get Organic Discovery and Increase Listeners?

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to feed. Feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey everybody. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard, your host and today I feel the need to speak on the subject. Today I'm considering it kind of like a public service announcement to those of you listening to the podcast, that there is a lot of confusion out there in the market among anybody that has a website, which are billions of us out there that have a website in the world, but in particular with podcasters, is obviously who we work with all the time. There's a lot of confusion around website SEO. And just recently, again, and we've talked about this in different ways at different times, but again, I've encountered more people.

Recently with this perception that they need to pay a company a lot of money every month to maintain their SEO so that their website continues to show up in search engines, very high in Google search for certain terms that they want to show up for. And I really just feel the need to help sort of pull back the curtain. I'm feeling like I'm toto with pulling the curtain back on the wizard here a little bit. And I want to help share what we know about SEO and just express some concern for all of our listeners out there to be cautious and to help you understand a little bit more about website SEO. What I don't want is all of you to be overly concerned with it and pay way too much money, spend too much money on a service that in a lot of cases is kind of wasted. That's what I want to share with you today. So I also want to preface this by saying we are not an SEO company at Paditize. That's not the primary service we provide in terms of getting your website to rank high in Google search for certain words for them. I'm talking about the main pages, the front public facing pages of your website. However, we have an awful lot of experience with this. We are working with about 500 podcasters and in their websites every week. And we see the data, we see the needle move over time. We know what works and what doesn't, at least from our perspective. And that's what I want to share with you today, I want to start off by saying there is an old school of website SEO and a new school in terms of philosophies. Okay, it used to be in the early days of web browsers and going back even 10 years, but certainly 15 or 20 years. How many of you remember Netscape Navigator, right? Or other browsers that you might have used. And, and obviously today you have on the Mac platform, Safari that's built in on the Windows platform, I think it's called Edge now that you have there, that's the built in one. But most people, I believe are using a browser like Chrome or Firefox, something like that, to do their Internet searching. And we all want to come up in that search. Actually, the browser you use doesn't really matter as much because it's really the search engine that you're searching in and that's Google. Obviously for most people, Bing is out there, not used as much, quite honestly. Although if you have an Amazon Alexa and you ask questions of Alexa, it's actually going to Bing for a lot of its stuff because Amazon and Google don't really play nice with each other.

SEO. What I'm talking about here in terms of the old school of SEO was you would have your website pages and I'm talking about your homepage. Your about page could be your product or service pages, any media page, press page, any front facing page that would be in the top level navigation. Usually you know, at the top of your webpage you're going to have all those different menu items, all those front facing pages that, or at least your home page. Certainly you want your homepage to come up very high in search for certain terms and certainly your name, your company name, maybe some key services. I mean, if you're a heating, air conditioning, ventilation contractor, you want to come up for searches for a lot of those sorts of terms. And so there are companies that for decades have been selling not only a service to initially help your site rank for those keywords and come up high in that search in the beginning, but they sell you a lot of times on a monthly subscription to maintain it to make sure you continue to come up high in that search. Okay, so that used to work a whole lot differently than it does today. There were a lot of tricks and tactics that could be used to put code within the back end of your website pages that would get you to rank on certain keywords, even if those keywords or keyword phrases didn't exist actually on your website, companies would sort of do what we would call keyword cramming, put it all in the code, didn't have to have it on the actual pages. And so there was a way to sort of hack the system, is what I'm saying, or hack the algorithm and get your website to show up for all sorts of things that maybe really didn't exist on your website. And over the years, the major search engines, certainly Google, which is where the vast majority of searches happen, they got wise to that and they continue to make algorithm changes, tweaks, changes to their code for how they analyze websites and to prevent that kind of keyword hacking. So that really doesn't happen anymore. But certainly what does happen is any words or phrases that are actually contained on those front facing pages of your website are words or phrases that you can and should rank for in searches, especially in Google. Okay? That's like one of the major fundamental shifts that happened over time. If you don't have a phrase or words in the copy of the public facing view of your web pages that has those words or phrases in it, if they're not in the copy, your website won't rank for those words. Okay? And in fact, in order to rank on them higher, the more times any of those words or phrases exist on your website, even within one page and on then multiple pages of your site, the more likely your website is to rank for those keywords. So it's very hard to really fudge the system. And here's really what I want to eliminate. Here's the really important point.

This is very important to do when you create your website or when something fundamental changes either about your website or your website pages, or maybe the products or services that you provide or whatever it is that your website is presenting to the world, if something fundamental changes in that, that's a good time to really look at the words and phrases contained there and the words and phrases that you're ranking on. Now, for those people that are hosted on Potitize or working with Potitize and have access to our client portal in our dashboard there is a website tab and in there you're going to see the top 20 keyword phrases your website ranks on. And you can download a spreadsheet of the top 100 phrases that your website ranks on. So if you're curious, you know, you work with us and you're curious to know what your site's ranking on, you can get that information for others. There are other services like Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Analytics, if it's installed on the back end of your website, can Give you some of this information as well. There's many ways you can look it up. But what I just want to make very clear is that if you're not ranking on something that you want to, if you're not showing up in search for a certain phrase or series of words, a single word is very hard to rank on because, I mean, a single word is probably present on millions of websites, right? Unless it's a made up word or an unusual word. It's really combinations of words, what we call long tail keyword phrases that are really what you want to rank on. Like the example I used before, plumbing and heating. Plumbing, heating and ventilation, contractors or companies or services. You know, those are long combinations of words. If those words are not contained on the page, won't rank on them. So I'm going to give you an example here of a Potter Ties customer named Adam Markel. Some of you may know him, others may not, but we've been working with him for a long time and we actually built his entire website. We don't always do that for customers, we do it for some. I mean, we're in hundreds of websites every week. And that's why we have a lot of experience with what works for SEO and what doesn't. So Adam Markel was really upset. Not upset at us, but upset one day when he went googling his own name, Adam Markell. Now, Adam Markell's website is AdamMarkel.com so it's pretty easy to type that in and go there if you know his name. But if somebody's Googling him, he expected his website would come up on the first page of Google search right at the top. And he didn't. And he was really puzzled and upset by this. And so this is an example of front facing web page SEO and the power of it. Okay? So he asked for our assistance, our support in reviewing it and trying to determine why he wasn't coming up for his own name. Because when he typed his own name, there were two pages of other websites that referred to him, referenced him. He was a guest on other people's podcasts. All these other sites showed up first and his site was buried on page three or four. And it's like, I don't get it, why am I not coming up? We analyzed his website and we found Adam's name was all over the main pages of his website, but it only said Adam. Rarely did his last name, Markel appear right after Adam. And this is sort of the lesson and shows you the power of on page SEO. Of your website. There was really no problem with his website other than the fact that the copy that he wanted everybody to be reading about him, he wanted to be more relatable, more real. And so it was. Adam believes in this. Adam espouses this. Adam is the founder of this. He wanted to be personal, more personable. But that was not a great SEO strategy, because if you don't have your last name next to your first name in the copy on your website, how do you expect your website to rank on that phrase that doesn't exist there? So we went into Adam's website, and not everywhere, because we still wanted it to have some of that personal feel, that relatable feel to the copy. And we weren't doing the copywriting. Adam's team did the copywriting because they know him better. But we just went in and added wherever it was, as many places as we could without it really sounding, I would say, too formal. Put Markel after Adam. Within seven days after we did that on his website, you went into Google search, type Adam Markel, and boom. First listing. At the very top of the first page of Google search, Adam Markel showed up for his name. We have experienced things like this over time, and that's why we know we have direct cause and effect. We see what works and how you can make sure you're showing up in Google. Search for some of the phrases. Now, it was easier with Adam's name because there are not many people on earth with that name and that have a website. And so it was easy for him to come up. Number one, if you're plumbing, heating and ventilation contractor, there's tens of thousands of those in the United States. So it may be hard for you to rank on that phrase alone, but you might be able to rank highly in your local geographic area. If it's plumbing, heating, ventilation, contractors, Cleveland, if you're in Cleveland, Ohio, or whatever town, the locality, the geography can play a role, and you can pretty easily rank high on that.

When we're thinking about our website SEO, the phrases we want to show up for, we got to really think about how those phrases can be present as many times as possible in the copy on your website in a genuine, organic way that isn't going to look odd. I mean, you don't just want to have a page full of all sorts of crazy phrases you want to rank on. That's nothing pleasant for people to read. That would make a lot of sense, right? My point in this is once you do that, once you set up your pages with the Words or phrases you want to rank on, you've done it. Is there really anything to be maintained month over month? Usually not. And that's why I really get frustrated and sometimes really disheartened when I meet somebody new who I hear, and I've heard this, who's spending $500 a month for a company to maintain their SEO and make sure they continue to show up at the top, top of Google search for their own name month after month. There's nothing for them to really do. This kind of SEO is something that you need to do once and then review it once, twice a year and make sure that it's still accurate and you're showing up for it. This is not something you need to maintain monthly. Now, different things you might want to have a service you know and pay them for to help you continue to show up monthly for is if you're doing a pay per click advertising campaign with Google, you want to come up in those paid. Those ad spots that come up usually two or three that are above the organic search results on any Google page. That's an entirely different animal and that is a paid program and you can pay to show up in those searches. Really all Google cares about is that you do pay for it. And how expensive it is is completely dependent on a few things. How big a search volume is there for those terms, how much competition is there for those terms. And there's a market that's ever changing for what you'll pay per click when somebody clicks on the ad and goes to your website. So that's different. That's not SEO, that's pay per click based on keywords though. Right? So there's some relation, there's some similarities. Now I want to share with you, even though that's what I was been talking about, sort of old school SEO was sort of the keyword hacking, putting things in the metadata, not putting it on the pages. I've shared with you what organic SEO is for keyword phrases on your main front facing pages. But now I want to share with you what we consider the new school of SEO. You need a little bit of the old school. You got to configure your website, make sure it's right, make sure you're ranking for what you want to. You can only rank on so many things unless each of your pages has thousands of words on it. Most front facing web pages for most of our websites don't have that many words. So there's only so much you're going to be able to do there. Here's where the wonderful power of podcasting comes in, though. And this is the new school of SEO, and this is what we do with all of our clients that we're producing episodes for is that your blog pages on your website are just. How would I describe them? They are.

Such a ripe opportunity for you, the podcaster and the website owner to rank on so many different things, thousands of different phrases, even tens of thousands of different phrases. And we see this all the time. We do it for ourselves, we do it for our clients. And we have people ranking anywhere if they're new to just, you know, a few hundred to a couple thousand keyword phrases, all the way up to hundreds of thousands of keyword phrases. And that's what can happen over time. How can that happen? Well, you have to have more content with more words in it in order to be able to do it. So you can either write blogs the hard way and write them, you know, like an article. It takes a long time. I think the statistics that we often cite when we speak at events is that the Average person takes 3 to 4 hours to write like a 1200 word blog post because, you know, you agonize over it. You want it to be perfect, you know, you want it to be good, you spend time on it. But you can speak your way to a 3,000 word blog post by recording a podcast that's about 20 minutes long. The average person speaks about 150 words a minute. Unless you're Scott Carson, somebody that we work with, and he speaks at, you know, probably 2:50 with gusts up to 300. I like to tease him, he's a friend too, but. But there are people. Even Tracy, the binge factor, speaks faster than some. She certainly speaks faster than me. I'm sort of one of those slower speakers when I podcast.

But this opportunity, podcasters have to just unlock all this wonderful keyword phrase rich terms that you're speaking in your episodes, and a lot of them that your guests are speaking is that if you leave it, if you don't create a blog post that's essentially a speech to text conversion in some way. And obviously we have our way that we do it that we think is the best, and we do that for our customers. But doing it at all is going to be helpful. And I don't know if everybody realizes this, but your podcast episodes on their own within the apps, are only searchable based on what is in the title and description of each episode and the title and description of your overall show description. But that is such a small Fraction of all the things that you say in your episodes, that's the new school of SEO is there is an unlimited number of keyword phrases your website can rank on. The more episodes you record and convert into blog posts, the more phrases you will rank on. And the great thing about keyword phrases is it's not a one and done proposition either. Because how you rank on a keyword phrase is not only about how many times that phrase exists on a page of your website or on multiple pages of your website. It also is largely about what your website is doing relative to other websites. And you know, there are always new, so websites being created, old ones, creating more content. So your keyword ranking over time can increase. Even if that blog post is a year old or three years old, that blog post can still gain ranking higher up within. Maybe it's been on page two and it moves up to page one. That sort of movement happens all the time and it's all relative based on what other people are doing. And some of the criteria that Google considers in this is not only how often does the word exist in your copy, does it exist within captions of images, does it exist in the metadata of the images and where else is it within the post? But also it has to do with, yeah, how many times you use it. Oh, but here's another biggie. Is your website something that is still publishing new blog posts every week? Is it publishing them on a regular basis? A website that's been static for months or even years is going to be still ranked on those keywords, but much lower in the list than a website that's publishing new content every week or even more than once every week. Google looks at the consistency and the frequency of publication, as well as the length and quality of the blog post.

There's a lot of things to consider here, and that's why as we got into podcasting many years ago, we discovered very quickly the power of what we in the industry is called page authority instead of domain authority. Getting your website domain to rank for certain things is much harder to do than a page within your website. And at the end of the day, when people are searching in Google, they're going to get results and if they're relevant, they're going to click on them and then boom, they're in your website on the blog post or the page that that keyword phrase is the highest in the listing that was in the search results that they click and get onto. So this is really what I wanted to share with you today about sort of the New school and old school of SEO. Again, I've visited this issue in the past. I try not to talk about it the exact same way every time, but it is so fundamental and important and just cringe when I see people spending way too much money on old school SEO tactics that really aren't helping them so much, or that they're not getting enough benefit out of, or also that the company that you're paying really isn't doing much for that. We do try to look out for all of our podcasters and make sure that their websites are ranking and coming up in enough. Their websites are ranking on the things they want to rank on and that their SEO is configured as good as it can be. But again, we're not necessarily the SEO experts, but we have an awful lot of experience and a lot of data that shows us these patterns and trends. And one thing we know, if you are a podcaster, you publish regularly and you convert that into a blog post, your website will continue to gain in keyword rankings and gain unique visitors from Google Search every month as a result. And at the end of the day, that's really what all of us podcasters want, is to be found by our ideal listeners. Our ideal followers are potentially our ideal customers, or certainly a group of people we can market to or are interested in what we have to sell, or interested in what we're providing them in terms of value. In our show, everybody has different goals, but we all want to be found, right? And that's really the message here today. New school SEO, so much more powerful and more valuable. Oh, and one last little tip. People often say, oh, but my domain name is this. And if I Google my domain name, maybe it's one domain name, but it's separated into a couple words. I type the words of my domain name and my domain name doesn't come up at the top of Google Search. You know what my feeling on that is? That's the least important part of SEO, because if people already know your domain name, they really don't need to Google it. They just type it in.com usually or.net or whatever your designation may be. If they already know your web URL, you've already won the battle, they're going to find you. So it's more important to rank on things that are their needs, their desires, their pain points that are in alignment with what you do, what you speak about in your podcast, what you have to offer them. All right, so that's it. That's my message for today. Thank you so much for listening. I will be back, and hopefully with my better half, Tracy, who was a little under the weather today. So that's why I'm doing this alone. But anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this episode. We'll be back with another great one next time. This is Tom Hazard signing off for feed. You'd brand.

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